The present disclosure relates generally to educational tools. In particular, interactive and educational containers are described.
Education is a central concern to parents, society, and to national prosperity. Early education is recognized as a highly important concept to build a strong foundation for later educational initiatives in the classroom and other sources. Core educational concepts that are important for children to be introduced to at a young age include basic concepts in mathematics, spelling, and color characteristics. Unfortunately, many children lack access to educational tools that can enable their educational development in these and other areas.
Known educational tools are not entirely satisfactory for the range of applications in which they are employed. For example, existing educational tools fail to provide a fun, interactive experience to children. Parents and educators alike recognize that interactive and fun activities are effective ways to maintain children's focus and interest. Maintaining a child's focus and interest is essential to conveying core educational concepts.
Many existing educational tools do not give children and parents sufficient opportunity to interact with the tool, which causes children to lose interest in the tool and the educational concepts involved. Physically manipulating and exploring items is inherent to children, and tools are needed that facilitate those natural physical instincts of children to hold their attention.
Existing educational tools also suffer from being too complicated in some contexts. For example, computerized educational tools are prone to being too complicated or too abstract to meet children's needs. Computerized tools may allow interaction with a mouse or touch screen, but such interaction is not as inherent to children as is manipulating and exploring physical items with an optimum number of interactive degrees of freedom.
A particular limitation of convention al educational tools is their failure to bridge gaps between abstract concepts and concrete realities more readily understood by children. For example, educational tools directed to mathematics are often limited to symbolic representations of numbers without providing tangible items to give context to the mathematical concepts involved. Educational tools attempting to teach children letters and spelling often lack reinforcing items that help children see hose letters interact to form words. Tools attempting to explain colors and how they interact to form blended colors often rely on discrete color displays that can not be physically combined to demonstrate how colors combine to form blended colors.
Another limitation of conventional educational tools is that they are not configured to contain, store, and transport items that contribute to the educational experience. It is well known that children enjoy interacting with toys, cards, paint, markers, crayons, books, and other items. It is also well known that toys and the like will end up everywhere or get lost without a convenient place to store them. Educational tools that could effectively accommodate items to supplement the educational experience into a self-contained system would provide numerous advantages over conventional educational tools.
Thus, there exists a need for educational tools that improve upon and advance the design of known educational tools. Examples of new and useful educational tools relevant to the needs existing in the field are discussed below.
Disclosure addressing one or more of the identified existing needs is provided in the detailed description below. Examples of references relevant to educational tools include U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,459,999; 2,932,909; D394878; D395675; D651649; 3,419,973; 3,783,531; 3,762,071; 3,200,517; 3,199,227; 4,634,385; 4,389,193; 3,289,324; 1,671,758; 4,643,680; 7,354,070; 4,313,727; 3,248,809; 6,869,286; and 7,938,282. Also relevant is the current inventor's copending U.S. application Ser. No. 14/755,281, filed on. Jun. 30, 2015, which is hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes. The complete disclosures of the above patents and patent applications are herein incorporate by reference for all purposes.